The Curse of the Evil Parrot…

I don’t know about you but I’m always sticking my foot in my mouth. Sometimes I wonder if the gods are playing some cruel game with me: Let’s see how awkward we can make Grant feel. Oh yes, that’d be a riot!

Let me explain: For some peculiar reason—I can’t fathom why—whenever I talk to someone with an accent I inadvertently mimic their speech. I don’t know, maybe I was an evil parrot in a past life and this character flaw is my penance. At any rate, this happened once while I was talking with a black woman. I actually answered her question with a very soulful mmmmhmmmm, you know it.

Oops.

And stutterers are some of the most frightening people to be around. Their speech patterns are so infectious and I find myself stumbling over my words, concentrating really hard on every syllable so that I don’t appear to be making fun of them. It’s as uncomfortable as talking to someone with a lazy eye: Dammit, which one do I look at?! God help me if I ever strike up a conversation with a person with Down Syndrome.

But my gaffs come in other embarrassing forms as well—though equally as mortifying. My most recent foot-in-the-mouth scenario occurred while I was working at my new job. When it gets busy, I get a little crazy—fun crazy. And I’ll pop off with a goofy comment like “thanks for the dance” if I stumble into another employee in a tight aisle.

But this time I did something totally different: I pretended like I was going to karate chop the employee and I coupled the exaggerated hand gesture with an equally exaggerated Hiiiiiyaaaaaw!! Only, the employee was Chinese…and I could tell by his facial expression and feeble sigh that he thought I was making fun of his ethnicity.

I quickly recovered, smiled, and added dumbly, “Pretty busy today, huh?”

DOH! The gods have won this round. And so my curse continues…